After use and wear, unsightly pills, which are small balls of fibres, or the like can form on the surfaces of some fabrics. Other unwanted material on the fabric surfaces may include lint, dust and loose fibres or hair. Many devices exist to remove these unwanted material from fabric surfaces including powered devices which operate in a similar fashion to electric shavers. However, these powered devices tend to be complicated, inefficient, bulky, cumbersome and expensive, and require a power input necessitating either a plug or batteries which adds to their cost and makes them impractical.
Many non-powered (manual) depilling devices exist which typically comprise a strip of abrasive material or a cutting surface mounted to a support such as a comb, as described and illustrated for example in U.S. Pat. No. 2,934,810, U.S. Pat. No. 3,471,977, U.S. Pat. No. 4,686,731, U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,561, U.S. Pat. No. 5,575,031 and U.S. Design 389,619. A user can grasp such devices by the support and pass the abrasive or cutting surface over the piece of fabric to detach the pills from the fabric. Some of the detached pills will be retained on the abrasive or cutting surface thereby removing them from the fabric surface.
Additional features may be provided for removing the loose material from the fabric surface. For example, the device of U.S. Pat. No. 5,575,031 provides notches in which the detached pills are collected, and the device of U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,561 provides a second delinting surface to collect the loose material. Delinting surfaces typically comprise a tacky/sticky material to which the loose material adheres such as adhesive paper, or a fabric with a slant, hook or loop pile mounted to a support for picking up lint and other loose pieces of unwanted material from the fabric surface. However, these devices tend to be awkward to handle and are limited to depilling and delinting operations only.
Therefore, it is desired to overcome or reduce at least some of the above-described problems.